http://www.usnews.com/money/blogs/the-best-life/2009/10/29/can-boomers-lead-an-elder-revolution-
By Philip Moeller
Posted: October 29, 2009
The implications of an aging world are widely viewed with alarm. When
10,000 people a day begin reaching retirement age in a few years, how
will society support them? And when these people are turning 65,
thousands more will be turning 80 or 85. Who will take care of them?
And how will we afford the bills? This enormous price tag is the
elephant in the room during debates about healthcare reform.
These are fair points. But what if, instead, an aging world turned
out to be a good thing? Is this even possible? Well, nearly 80
million baby boomers are here to say that they've had a great run so
far and they expect, no, they demand, that it will continue. AARP and
other powerful advocates for seniors' interests are working toward
positive outcomes as well. Are we moving toward a seniors-dominated
world? And if that's so, what might this world look like?
Forty years ago, Theodore Roszak wrote The Making of a Counter
Culture, which captured the late-1960s disaffection by young people
across the country. They had been raised in material comfort
following World War II, but they rejected the world created by those
comforts. They opposed the Vietnam War and the industrial-military
complex they blamed for the war. Of course, the protesters of the
1960s and 1970s did eventually join the rat race they had earlier
condemned. They were the leading edge of the baby boomer generation,
and they became more materialistic and prosperous by far than the
corporate "sell outs" they had criticized in their youth.
Roszak, a college teacher and author of 15 books who is now in his
late 70s, has issued another rallying cry to this generation with The
Making of an Elder Culture, published earlier this year. In it, he
argues that the baby boomers are hardly finished making their mark on
the world. "Boomers, who will usher us into senior dominance, are the
best educated, most socially conscientious, most politically savvy
older generation the world has ever seen," he says. "I believe that
generation will want to do good things with the power that history
has unexpectedly thrust upon it in its senior years. What boomers
left undone in their youth, they will return to take up in their maturity."
Roszak is still crusading. Conservative government leaders and
consumption-driven corporations are still his bad guys. But while he
makes a lot of valid points, the polemics of The Making of an Elder
Culture can get in the way of the powerful forces at work here.
Seniors have rising power, in numbers and especially in the voting
booth. This is a global trend; the U.S. actually is younger than
other industrial democracies. Advances in agriculture have enabled
sustainable increases in world population. Advances in medicine have
permitted this growing population to reach ages never seen before.
In the elder culture that Roszak envisions, longevity and health
become driving social and economic forces. Aging boomers will return
to their youthful idealism. They will work to improve the environment
and climate problems. They will volunteer like crazy. In their longer
lives, they will embrace newly rediscovered values. "The final stage
of life is uniquely suited to the creation of new social forms and
cultural possibilities," he says. "Age offers us the opportunity to
detach from the competitive, high-consumption priorities that
dominated us on the job and in the marketplace."
Consuming less is both an effect and an enabling cause of an emerging
elder culture. Creating much smaller consumption footprints will
relieve environmental pressures and also force businesses to change
their priorities. Smaller working-age populations can still meet
society's material needs if those needs are pared back. Healthcare
consumption will be much more important, but it will be less
resource-intensive. "The money we lay out for healthcare should be
seen, not as a regrettable cost, but as an investment in economic
progress," Roszak says. "The raw material of our economy will be
ailing and aging bodies, the product will be better health, longer
lives. . . . We will wake up to the fact that health and longevity
are, at last, the highest state of industrial development."
While Roszak paints a very rosy future, he recognizes that it won't
come about smoothly or without some serious conflicts. He places a
lot of faith, perhaps too much, in the ultimate power of senior
majorities to get their way in a democratic society. "Not many
societies have treated their seniors as more than troublesome
dependents who are expected to stand aside and let life pass them
by," he observes. "We have no precedent for an insurgent elder population."
Two battlegrounds predicted by Roszak deserve mention. Both conflicts
have been underway for some time but increasingly are coming out into
the open. Who will pay for the longevity revolution? he asks. That
question is central to the healthcare-reform debates over changes to
Medicare and Medicaid. "Whatever the outcome, entitlements will be
the battlefield on which the first great campaigns of the elder
culture are waged," Roszak says.
The second battlefield involves the upwards of 25 million
Americansmostly women, mostly unpaidwho now care for aging
relatives. The model of home-based, family care was created in the
1800s and 1900s when there were no government safety nets and when
large families were better equipped to take care of themselves.
Today, more and more family members are surviving into their 80s and
90s, and are living with chronic conditions that once would have
meant a quick death sentence. They are overwhelming family caregivers
in both their numbers and the complexity and intensity of their
medical needs. And this is happening even as family structures are crumbling.
"We are keeping people alive well beyond any limit for which the
family was designed to provide wholly self-reliant care," Roszak
says. This situation won't be tolerated indefinitely: "The revolt of
the caregivers, when it comes, may be the turning point in the
history of the elder culture, as distinctive and defining as the
anti-war rallies of the 1960s and 1970s."
If baby boomers and older seniors need a role model for how to build
an elder culture, Roszak holds up one drawn from their youthMaggie
Kuhn, who founded the Gray Panthers nearly 40 years ago after she was
forced into retirement at the age of 65 (she died in 1995 at the age
of 89). It's clear that Roszak hopes and expects that many Maggie
Kuhns will emerge from the ranks of today's baby boomers.
It's time for the aged to lead the way, he quotes Kuhn as saying:
"The old, having the benefit of life experience, the time to get
things done, and the least to lose by sticking their necks out, [are]
in a perfect position to serve as the advocates for the larger public good."
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